By Yun-hua Chen. The idea of the film didn’t stem from the footage, but from the apartment. My parents decided to sell it, and it was empty for several months. I have lived there for 25 years, and once per month I would go there…. And then I realized that […]
“Stories About Heroes Travel Faster Than Bullets”: Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. 84 minutes of pure African genre mayhem, with little interest in pausing long enough for you to catch your breath….with this Senegalese western-action-horror hybrid Herbulot is here to sure as hell make you recognize [the historical context] on a sensory, emotional level.” Strap in; Jean Luc Herbulot’s […]
Annette: a Coming-of-Age Miracle
by Levan Tskhovrebadze. It seems as the French director torments himself over personal misfortune; however, he summons paradoxes of life and transpires this absurdist tragedy as a coming-of-age spectacle for the baby miracle Annette.” “Each man kills the thing he lovesby each let this be heard”–Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde’s gloomy […]
Lay Down Your Souls – Venom: Let There Be Carnage
By Elias Savada. A frothy, silly flick, full of gory hijinks and dumbster fun. Let the slapstick continue.” I wonder if anyone at Columbia Pictures, the studio that has that small chunk of the other Marvel action figures that Disney hasn’t encased, remembers that it was also the movie company […]
The Many Saints of Newark: A Fond, Bloody Prequel
By Elias Savada. Brutal and deadly, as expected, and a fiercely written gangster drama, the film is also a fitting period piece….” The best things about HBO’s The Sopranos were the deeply emotional heft of its characters and, of course, the brutality they constantly extracted upon one another. Fans of […]
Toxic Dreams of Kate Bush: Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. A bedazzled, audacious dreamscape riddled with sex and violence and the ever-present spirit of high fashion…. we drift in and out of After Blue like something akin to a fever dream….” If your first encounter with the film worlds of French art-weirdo auteur genius Bertrand Mandico doesn’t […]
Stages of Revenge, New England-Style: John Pollono on Small Engine Repair
By Ali Moosavi. Great theater can be very cerebral, it can be very thematic, it can be very dialogue driven and stirring but it doesn’t necessarily have the same visceral stakes that a movie does. This play has cinematic stakes, so the transfer of it to film was just really […]
Inexorable and the Suffocating Expanses of Fabrice Du Welz (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. This Belgian filmmaker’s extraordinary mastery over space and his ability to manipulate our experience of it draws me into his frequently dark, sometimes tragic and commonly perverse movies.” There are few filmmakers whose movies so effectively create a sense of claustrophobia, of suffocation, of being closed in […]
“A Trial, by Nature, is Theatre” – Real to Reel: Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies
A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. An insightful and well researched book on judicial processes and views on expressing justice, its meaning, and duplicity within the Hollywood courtroom film genre.” Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies (Vandeplas Publishing, 2021) written and researched by two prominent law professors and cinephiles – […]
Dear Evan Hansen: Not Quite the Broadway Epiphany
By Elias Savada. The new movie adaptation, starring a now 27-year-old Platt, has a few problems…. the conversion to the big screen (of this tale concerning social anxiety disorder) brought the play’s A+ grade down to a B-minus.” Just over six years ago, a high school musical captured my heart […]